Rush Limbaugh drives me nuts, because he’s sometimes at least a little bit right about some things. Of course he’s a shameless partisan hack — yet with just enough humor and warmth that you can’t help but stay tuned.

Of course Rush’s teeth are all over Obama as well. Though mostly he’s working to submerge and drown the best of Obama under the worst of Wright.

Andrew Sullivan finds some stuff to agree with, in the midst of Rush’s several-hour chew-fest on Obama. But Andrew also points back toward the high road that Barack needs to find again, if the candidate doesn’t want to hand the game over to Hillary, for her to hand over to John McCain (which is the way to bet now in any case, if you’re just following the odds). Sez Andrew:

Obama is a mixture in this, as in so many things, a complicated mixture. My view is it is that very mixture, that very embodiment of American complexity that makes Obama such a next-generation candidate.

It is no wonder the some of the old guard have mixed feelings about his ascendancy; or that Wright, at this point, might feel jealousy and the erosion of his worldview. And that’s why Obama needs to spell out again his own vision of a post-racial America that is not a non-racial America. Instead of seeking to play out the clock, he needs to seize the narrative again, before it irreparably seizes him.

Additionally, we have awarded two special prizes for the initiatives we considered groundbreaking. The VRM project lead by Doc Searls is from our point of view a very innovative approach to bring the concept of user-centric identity to customer management. During the VRM Unconference 2008 this topic has been intensively discussed for the first time in Europe. The second special prize goes to open source projects Higgins and Bandit, which we consider the most important open source initiatives in the field of Identity Management.

Big thanks to Joerg, Martin and all the folks at Kuppinger Cole for hosting VRM 2008 and for welcoming all the participants from the VRM crew to EIC2008.

We have many more events coming up. In addition to regularly (and irregularly) scheduled ones in the U.K and elsewhere in Europe (need to get everything on the wiki), we have the VRM sessions at the next IIW, plus the first VRMW (VRM Workshop, unless we come up with a better name for it) at Harvard on 9-10 July. Mark your calendars.

I missed Munich last week, at least physically. But I did get there virtually. There’s a video here of the keynote I gave (complete with slides — nice editing job there by Mike Deehan of the Berkman Center, who also stayed up all night with me as we got this done in the wee hours of East Coast Time). Most of that was not shown at the conference, due to technical glitches. But at least it got captured at the source end.

In social-political terms, it means looking for a local solution and then growing that solution to connect to other resources. It seems like something that could be done, would be good for Nicaragua/Nicaraguan communities and would even appeal to some organizations looking to make grants. Much like the grants for the sewer and water projects in Estelí, this is infrastructure. Up-front costs are much larger than operating costs so it doesn’t build that dependency cycle.

Am I crazy?

Nope.

Phil is in a great position to build infrastructure from the edge in. Also to see The Problem of centralization for the purpose only of creating artificial scarcities and charging for them. If we’re going to start working around connectivity compromised by value-subtracting business models, towns like Phil’s are good places to start. (Also to start leading incumbent carriers toward a future where they are part of a new ecosystem that’s much larger than the one they’ll need to quit trying to control.)

By the way, Phil is the friend who started (and for most of its history published) Linux Journal and hired me on there in the late ’90s. It was Phil who showed me (without meaning to, which might be the best way) that the software industry was slowly but surely turning in to the construction industry.

And that’s exacty the model we need to follow as we buid this thing back out, from the edge in.

After brunch at Johnny D’s yesterday, we caught the Forbes Flyers — a rope jumping team of high schoolers from Torrington, CT — putting on an amazing demonstration of skill and enthusiasm, outside the Davis stop on the Red Line in Somerville. Turned out they were there to help promote Jump!, a movie showing that afternoon, and this evening, right next door at the Somerville Theater, as part of Boston’s Independent Film Festival.

I’m trying to put up one of the short videos I shot with my little Canon still camera, and it hasn’t appeared yet. Check here to see it it’s showed up. Meanwhile, hereare a couple of Forbes Flyers’ own from their collection on YouTube.

So, after going to a museum at MIT for about an hour or so, we returned and caught the movie, and with it an enthusiasm both for the sport and the Xtremely Fine Job that Helen Wood Scheer, Scott B. Morgan and crew did putting the movie together. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen, on any subject.

So I decided to cave in and say yes to patients waiting in the accumulating pile of friend requests at my Facebook account. Haven’t been to Facebook in awhile, so I was also curious to see if “friending” has improved since the last time I slogged my way through the process.

First, l lost count of how many seconds passed during login. As usual, I clicked “remember me”, but I have no faith that it will next time. It never has before.

Second, I now have 190 friend requests. I know a few dozen of these folks. I would like to say yes to them as a group. While this would be handy and useful, and must be something that users have wanted for a long time, it’s still not there — though it’s nice to see that the silly intermediate checkbox thing (about how you know this person) is gone. Still, it takes another 1018 25 seconds or so between clicking “confirm” and actual confirmation. With nothing happening in the browser’s status bar. So you have no idea if clicking even worked.

Makes me wonder if there is a cure for silos that isn’t yet another silo.

There has to be. Eventually. Somehow.

[Later...] I just “friended” a few people. They took, 30, 15, 8, 14, 33, 5, 34, 15, 5 and 5 seconds. I won’t bother to average those, because they don’t include the last two I tried. Both took more than a minute before I gave up because nothing happened. Awful.

When a blog comment to an ancient post comes into moderation and it has no relevance to that post, and the English is awful, I’m figuring it’s a splog (spam blog) comment. So I kill it.

The latest one killed went, question: How many guys ( MARRIED) feel that all they do is for not? eg… work around the house/ work for a living eg… bring home the bacon. / try to do all they can with their kids and then some. If you feel the same way i do tell my wife. That’s in response to this post from last September.

What would have happened if I had approved it? Well, in the past at least one of them turned my server into a spam slave. Or something. I just remember that the server was compromised and unscrewing it took a lot of work. The compromise came in through an old WordPress install that hadn’t been updated. One blog was killed outright and another still isn’t back.

More about the risks here. Sad that the Web has turned into a city where everybody has to bolt their doors, but … it is.